Slim, bearded and slightly fidgety, the Wikipedia founder Jimbo Walesis known as the "god king" to his online followers. He seems to quiteenjoy the adulation.

"I'm not really such a businessman - I'm a revolutionary trying todestroy an entire industry," he declared at a talk in New York thisweek, before hastily adding: "I'm joking, of course."

Since its creation six years ago, Wales' online encyclopedia hasbecome an internet sensation. It is one of the 15 most visitedwebsites worldwide and has 7m entries in 251 languages.

The simple idea behind the site is that any visitor can edit, orextend, Wikipedia's entries and the ultimate outcome will be agravitation towards accuracy. It works, albeit with the odd flaw:recently, wags kept altering the entry on Kazakhstan to say that thenation was ruled by Borat.

Irrespective of the glitches, Wales reckons Wikipedia's democratic,free access, principle is central to the internet's culture. He isworking on a new project - Wikia - which is intended to challenge theonline establishment and will be properly up and running by the end ofthe year.

Wikia is a hosting site for online communities to read, discuss andshare information. It is intended to be a more leisurely,magazine-style format to complement the reference material onWikipedia.

Central to his plan is the creation of a "democratic" search engine -Wiki Search - in which users will collaborate to produce good qualityresults.

Wales, the 40-year-old son of a grocery manager from Alabama, reckonsthe internet needs an alternative to the like of Google and Yahoo!.

"If you compare the quality of search products - Google, Yahoo! andAsk - they're very similar," he told reporters at New York's ForeignPress Centre this week.

"No one has clear leadership. Five years ago this wasn't the case butthe production of good quality search results is getting very close tobeing a commodity - any mid-size company can do it."

His idea is for the results of any search to be controlled by a broadcommunity of sensible people without any commercial interests. As heputs it, "thoughtful people coming together and developing'compromise' results".

A search for a hotel in a particular city, for example, could thenthrow up genuine recommendations of promising places to stay ratherthan the glut of accommodation booking services delivered by Google.It sounds a good idea - but can it work?

Open source

The code behind Wiki searches, he says, will be open and available forothers to copy - along the lines of the co-operatively developed webbrowser Firefox, which is available for free tinkering and download.Firefox is a big success - according to research firm NetApplications,it has snatched a global market share of 15% from establishment rivalssuch as Internet Explorer since its creation in 2004.

A big difference between Wikia and not-for-profit Wikipedia is thatWales wants to make money out of his new project. Wikia has venturecapital funding and has attracted an investment from the onlinebookseller Amazon.

He is a little vague about exactly what his business plan is, exceptthat revenue will come from advertising. It is not entirely clear,however, just how many advertisers will be attracted to Wikia's ownsite if the search concept is freely lifted and copied on other siteswidely around the web.

Insistently, Wales professes his lack of business knowledge. Whenasked whether Google's $500-a-share stock price is over the top, hereplies: "I have no idea or opinion on what Google's stock price is."

As for the idea that he is snapping at the search giant's heels, hesays: "It's just funny. Google's huge and enormous. I'm just me."

This doesn't quite ring true. Wales used to work as a futures andoptions trader in Chicago. He has a master's degree in finance andworked towards a doctorate in the same subject - although he nevercompleted a dissertation.

Indeed, Wales' suggestion that Wikia is "just me" is a bit misleading- he already has 33 full-time employees and is opening a programmingcentre with 15 people in low-cost Poland.

Nevertheless, the project is just a start, he hints broadly.

"There's a major movement just beginning to get underway - thedemocratisation of media, the democratisation of knowledge. I believepeople can collaborate together freely and produce very, very goodquality work - I want to push that forward."

The establishment shouldn't worry too much. He is friendly withGoogle's founders and says he admires their work. And he doesn't seedemocratisation as wiping out the professional world - newspapers, hepoints out, cannot entirely be replaced by casual bloggers.